Today, Microsoft officially unveiled its next release of Windows Phone. Although a lot of the features that were shown were expected, it was a pleasant surprise to sdee that the version was 7.1 and not 7.5, as a lot of developers thought it would be.

During today's demo, we saw the following improvements and additions in action:

Updated live tiles (now easily accessible by third party developers)

Threads (people can use Facebook Chat, Live Messenger and texting in the context of one conversation page)

Internet Explorer 9 with maximum support for HTML5

Groups (similar to Facebook Groups, where you can arrange your contacts in specific sequences for easier status tracking and communication)